Large enterprises depend heavily on their information technology (IT) systems and applications to run their businesses. For each one of these enterprises, IT systems and applications are typically distributed across multiple geographic locations. Since IT costs are a significant component of an enterprise's overall operational costs, large enterprises need to become more efficient and still cut costs. To achieve this goal, enterprises periodically undertake large transformation projects where all or parts of the IT infrastructure are simplified by consolidating the infrastructure, for example, into a smaller number of data center locations. Such consolidation typically includes migrating one or more elements of the infrastructure. Migration can refer to physical migration, virtual migration, combinations thereof, and can be performed within a datacenter, across geographic locations, and combinations thereof, depending upon the given requirements.
A common practice for managing migration is to employ spreadsheets and a very large number of consultants to manually create plans and schedules which attempt to take into account issues associated with the migration. However, it is known that this manual practice is typically inefficient and requires a full redesign when any changes occur, which is typical in most migrations. This increases the turnaround time for generating plans which in turn extends the period of migration causing inconvenience to users of the IT systems and applications.